Middle East

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON-In the western media’s telling, the civil war in Syria began and continues as a morality play, good versus evil, and for good reason. The regime headed for nearly a decade and a half by Bashar al-Assad has pursued policies of extreme brutality, including large-scale executions of rebellious groups’ women and children. But could this tale end in a tragedy of unintended consequences? What should America do?

The West has focused on why the regime should fall. In addition to its record of human rights abuse, the Assad alliance with Iran gives ample motivation for Europe and the United States to want Syria under new management. So after a seemingly interminable period of vacillation, the Obama administration has joined other western powers in supplying selected Syrian rebel groups.

by Stanley A. Weiss

Playing in theaters across the United States is a film called ” Upside Down, ” about an alternate universe where twin worlds sit stacked like bread in a sandwich, separated by opposite gravities. If our world could somehow have a similar twin, last month would have marked the tenth anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s willingness to abandon his nuclear program without a shot being fired. Headline writers would have sung the praises of the sanctions regime imposed by the United Nations, which compelled Saddam to abandon his push for weapons of mass destruction. Abu Ghraib would still be a little-known, nondescript prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. And 4,808 American soldiers would still be alive to celebrate birthdays, weddings and Little League baseball games.

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — On December 4, 2008, exactly 40 years after returning from a tour as an infantryman in the Vietnam War, United States Senator Chuck Hagel spoke of peace. “When I think of jobs and improving people’s conditions,” he told the nonpartisan Israel Policy Forum, “I think of what Stef Wertheimer has been doing in Turkey and Israel.” Hagel explained that Wertheimer — one of Israel’s wealthiest men — “has five very high-tech industrial base firms in Turkey and Israel. They’re planning twenty more. I’ve been there. I’ve seen them. Here he has Palestinians and Israelis and Jews working side by side in these plants, and he is helping educate their children. They have futures, they have opportunities. This is not some idealistic dream, in fact it’s happened.”

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON — In global affairs, nothing can be so hard to see as the obvious, if it is big enough. Nowhere is this truer than in the transformation of the international diplomatic and security system now underway. Before our eyes — if not yet in strategic planning — the map of the world is rearranging itself.

by Stanley A. Weiss

LONDON – In December 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, United States Secretary of State James Baker gave a speech at Princeton University on the relationship between the U.S. and the “Newly Independent States” of the former USSR. In his remarks, Baker took aim at a curious target: the tiny Republic of Azerbaijan — about the size of the state of Maine — which Baker described as undeserving of American recognition until it accepted a long list of conditions the U.S. had required of few other nations. Soviet watchers saw it as the work of the U.S. lobby of Azerbaijan’s neighbor and sworn enemy, Armenia, to blacklist the ancient nation in the Caucuses region on the Caspian Sea.

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON— On November 12, 1893 — 119 years ago today — Afghanistan’s Amir Rahman Khan and Britain’s Foreign Secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand, drew a line across the roof of the world. Running roughly 1,600 miles through the rugged peaks of Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan, the Durand Line was intended to mark “the limit of their respective spheres of influence, so that for the future there may be no difference of opinion on the subject.” (Should “any difference of detail” arise, the agreement stated, they were to be “settled in a friendly spirit.”)

by Stanley A. Weiss

WASHINGTON — Had the course of history taken a modest swerve, the United States and Kurdistan might have celebrated their independence on the very same day. It was July 4, 1187 — 825 years ago — that Saladin, Islam’s greatest ruler, defeated 20,000 outmatched Crusaders at the bloody Battle of Hattin. The victory ultimately delivered Jerusalem into the hands of Saladin, the crown jewel of an Islamic caliphate stretching from the shores of Tunis through Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus.

by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD — When Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan met last month with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin about the civil war in Syria, political biographers had a right to be confused. After all, one is the leader of a government that has imprisoned more journalists than China and Iran combined; empowered special courts to arrest citizens on suspicion of terrorism without evidence or the right to a hearing; sentenced two students to eight years in prison for holding a sign at a rally demanding “free education;’ and has seen more than 20,000 complaints filed against it in the European Court of Human Rights since 2008. The other is president of Russia.

It began in the Netherlands, as outraged Calvinists smashed statues to protest the wealth and excesses of Spain and the Catholic Church. In Germany, starving soldiers laid waste to entire regions. The ensuing war engulfed all of 17th-century Europe in 80 years of bloody religious conflict. After the assassination of generals and the death of kings, after nearly one-third of Germany’s population lay dead from the plague or the sword, Europe’s rulers finally came together. They intended only to end the wars; they did not expect to create a new global order. But when they finally signed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe – and the world – was on its way to being transformed.

In the center of Jerusalem is a series of platforms that were built over many centuries, known as the Temple Mount, on Mount Moriah. The stone peak of Mount Moriah is visible at the center of the Temple Mount.